Article | Menopause is going mainstream and it’s transforming the GP appointment

Dr Krishna Vakharia is a GP and clinical director for Patient UK, the leading online resource for evidence-based healthcare information for patients and health professionals. Here she explores what she calls the ‘expert patient trend’ - a growing number of people empowered through symptom tracking, health data collection and education, and how women experiencing menopause are among the driving force.

For years GPs like myself have been warning patients about the dangers of turning to Google for a medical diagnosis.

I can’t tell you the number of times a patient has sat in my surgery convinced they had a life-threatening illness because they took a wrong turn and got dragged down a rabbit hole checking their symptoms online.

But I’ve also seen, especially in the last year or so, a rising number of patients taking ownership of their health and actively seeking knowledge about conditions, especially complex ones such as the menopause.

For me both as a GP and as a woman, that’s one of the real positives of menopause going mainstream.

Menopause was once mentioned in hushed tones, now it’s trending

For years menopause wasn’t openly discussed. Often women had to simply figure it out for themselves. Many may not have even known they were experiencing the menopause.

In a society where there’s so much pressure on women to defy the natural aging process, talking about menopause often wasn’t encouraged. There were too many negative connotations with it, with the condition often being the punchline of jokes about women of a ‘certain age’.

But now menopause has officially gone mainstream. Celebrities such as Davina McCall and Drew Barrymore having a hot flush mid-interview are raising awareness that the symptoms of menopause are perfectly normal and nothing to be ashamed of.

On the App Store alone there are thousands of smartphone apps dedicated to tracking menopause symptoms, recording health data and networks allowing women to share their own menopause experiences.

And on our platform, Patient, there are 4,000 mentions of the term menopause and just under 2,000 search items on perimenopause.

In my own surgery, particularly for menopause, I see more women who I would consider to be expert patients. They come to their appointment armed with a deep understanding of their health, the treatments available and a willingness to share their app recorded health data to provide the GP with greater insight.

These expert patients are changing the typical flow of a GP appointment, creating a shortcut to the answers clinicians need and patients want.

And that’s vital, especially for complex conditions such as menopause, as recent research revealed seven per cent of UK women will have 10 GP appointments before they receive adequate menopause help or advice.

Breaking down misinformation

It’s not just patients that are keen to learn more about menopause, clinicians are too.

For years GPs were dissuaded from prescribing HRT because of the links to breast cancer, strokes, and blood clots. This led to many women battling through menopause without the treatment they needed. Although now these links have been found to be much lower than once believed and more is known about how best to take HRT, GPs still err on the side of caution when it comes to prescribing it.

Dr Nighat Arif, a GP and specialist in women’s health and family planning, said in her evidence there was ‘misogyny within medicine when it comes to women’s health’, which she said had led to the ‘normalisation’ of women’s pain and menopause symptoms.

From 10 to just one

Some GPs may be cautious of expert patients, but I for one embrace them. Their knowledge isn’t panic as a result of a wrong turn during a Google search, but evidence-based data that will help us tackle their health concerns collaboratively.

For years we’ve been urging people to take more ownership of their own health and now we’re seeing in greater numbers of people doing just that. They’re now arming us with vital health data insights so together – GP and patient – can ensure that it doesn’t take 10 appointments to start receiving adequate menopause care. It should take just one.